it was only a glimpse then

tangible brokenness

The gruesome image of my husband’s ankle split wide apart—bone exposed—taken by an audacious ER nurse who couldn’t believe his eyes is unsettling at best.

The incongruity can only be fully understood by knowing that my husband is a natural athlete. He throws a football 65 yards in the air from one knee, launches a golf ball 350 yards. Grown men just stand quietly and gawk.

The night he came down on another guy’s foot while playing volleyball, however, ended with a break, a gaping wound. It was hard to absorb, comprehend. Everything I knew of this strong, brave, powerful man was dramatically altered in that moment on the gym floor with a bone exposed.

Again grown men stood silent and gawking.

This is not how life is supposed to go. This goes against the very design.

When JP talked last week in the ongoing series about the life of Jesus, he worked through Luke 7 when Jesus healed the centurion’s son and later brought the widow’s son back to life.

He talked about death. It is a part of all our lives. Inescapable.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 6:23.

Ultimately the result of our rebellion against a good God, death is the final wage paid for our own disobedience.

So JP poses that question, why is death the consequence? Why is it the wages of sin?

He explains that God reveals what our lives would look like apart from Him. Feeble minds grasp, strain to comprehend the gravity of life away from Yaweh.

God gave us life. We were made to live and yet we chose death.

God literally is life so when we choose to go away from Him, we are choosing separation, a broken relationship that is the equivalent of death.

Our choice of sin over God is a turning of our backs on life.

This is a fracture. This is a tangible brokenness—like a bone protruding. It is a no-doubt-kind of broken thing.

When sickness, brokenness, death enter in, there is a suffocating desperation for it is the literal cutting off from the source of life. It goes against the very design.

JP goes on talking about death and funerals and this reality we all will face.

My own family is fresh off a funeral—that of my sweet father-in-law. We are still processing what life is like on the other side of that. Do you actually move past death? It is a raw and ugly learning of what death does to life. It shakes all those left living right down to the core. The closer you were to that one now dead, the more altered your ongoing life now is.

The ripple effects of that life lost rock all that is your world.

So it had to have been for that widow in Nain. Her only a son, a young man that must have borne an abnormally larger weight without a father at home to help ease the burden of caring, supporting, providing. Her affections, her lifeline were severed with his loss. Already reeling from a husband lost, now this.

This is not how life is supposed to go. This goes agains the very design.

The wages of sin is death because it is the ultimate separation from life and it is only grace that lets us see and grasp this.

We see that bone coming out through skin and know that this is not how things should be. Pain and suffering remind us we were not made for this.

We see a the body of our loved one in a coffin and know that this is not how things should be. Death is separating us from love, from life.

We see a mother with no prospects for life as her son is carried out for burial and know that this is not how things should be.

A broken, fractured and sinful world lets us see fully the absence of communion, see the horror of sin and separation.

That mother’s hurt must have been enormous, desperation palpable.

Only in these moments of magnificent deficit can we begin to understand the beauty of rescue.

The beauty of His life set against the barren backdrop of death is what reveals the glory of God.

We see best in the darkest moments by the light of His life.

The King of all creation gazed upon death, upon that mother and had compassion.

Jesus saw her and her need. She saw the wages of sin.

He could see her through the crowd and while grief consumed, he pursued her.

The wailing crowd encompassed this mother and her son laid out on a platform.

The bier held his body as he was carried outside of the city to his eventual burial spot. According to Jewish law, touching a dead body would make a person unclean—in fact it was considered a pollution of sorts.

Death pollutes. It defiles the living. Impurity is imputed when the living is touched by death.

For a person to touch death meant a cleansing ritual was imperative if one was to rejoin the living, to go again to worship.

Jesus saw the depth of her ache and despair and the overwhelming death that isolated her and He walked right into it.

He offered comfort with words and then Life touched death. He reached into impurity, uncleanness, defilement, and brought back life.

“Young man, I say to you arise.”

Suddenly and without doubt, the contrast of separation from God and the reality of His presence brought fear and then worship.

Jesus would one day again walk right into death.

He would willingly take it on and again triumph.

The disciples minds must have run wild, not unlike mine trying to find a way to get help for my broken husband, not unlike that widow wondering wildly what now? Their world was shaken.

This is not how life is supposed to go. This goes against the very design.

The giver of all life hanging on a a cross allowing death to rule was the turning point.

That moment of surrender inevitably alters all that comes after. Life itself could not be ultimately overcome.

The glory of God is revealed in that barren backdrop when Life fully conquers death and a tomb is left empty and we are no longer left alone and separated.

The wages are paid.

When they are paid we find that

the rebellion that leads to death has been permanently staved.

the broken body, wide open and exposed is healed and covered.

the ripple effects of a life line severed are stilled despite the storm.

the ritually unclean is made permanently pure.

When we have looked the desperation fully in the face and recognized its depths, we can begin to comprehend the heights.

It is grace that shows us that nothing else will satisfy, not for a moment, not for eternity.

It is grace calling us again, stripping away sin so that we are not deceived and so that we too will rise again.

This is how it is supposed to go. This is the very design and it is something you will want to see.